GSP East - fail whales, ADD and Nietzsche’s typewriter
For devotees of the social media conference circuit the medium is clearly the message…
From 9 - 11 June I spent my waking hours at the O’Reilly conference, Graphing Social Patterns East, in Washington DC. Lots of senior developer types from Facebook, Google and Myspace and the like presenting to a fairly geeky audience. As someone whose interest in social media is heavily skewed towards small businesses and commerce, I was a little disappointed that neither term was actually mentioned over the three days!
Content aside, what stood out from the opening minutes was the collective audience behaviour. As panellists talked, the audience went about its business: maintaining profiles on the social network of choice, tweeting like no tomorrow, and I kid you not, listening to iPods whilst updating Facebook. In short, we weren’t listening. For those with an interest in the conference proceedings, this was often enjoyed as a mediated experience. Following the GSP East Twitter Feed, or reading live blogging coverage from one of our fellow attendees took precedence over actually sitting back and digesting what the people just a few metres away were saying.
(With an absence of irony, the conference organisers did request on day 1 that mobiles were turned off less they disturb the sessions!)
What did I take away from this experience?
1. For those in the social networking biz, the tools of the trade seem to be at least as important as the content - in other words, the medium trumps the message. This is nothing new to Web 2.0 though: Nietzsche reflecting on how his writing style had changed since using a typewriter said “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Well that explains Twitter then …
2. The views of others take precedence over a personal and original standpoint - it’s easier and faster to consume another person’s perspective than think about something yourself for the first time (This point was drilled home to me by the UGC videos introducing each session, which were practically all derivative riffs on other people’s work).
So it appears to me that we may be suffering from a Web 2.0 induced attention deficit disorder. Quite a worry really.
Posted by Ivan Croxford on June 21, 2008
Tags: GSPEast08
I’m a digital strategist and I like building new businesses. This blog is an opportunity for me to air some of the insights, issues and themes that I come across in the course of my work. I’d love for some/any of these to be picked up as part of the broader conversation on digital disruption.
A thought-provoking post that is as frustrating as it is provocative.
It’s good news, in a sense, that the social network et al don’t get small business because they are staying out of the way of people like you and I who are passionate about it but does illustrate that these people aren’t often trying to be evangelical and attracting new recruits for the movement but are rather preaching to the choir and fighting for the attention of the already recruited. It’s like watching tramps fighing over the last can of stella.
For a long time it has frustrated me that the too-school-for-school crowd of Web 2.0 masturbators aren’t interested in getting ordinary folks to do ordinary things (like promote their busines) and would rather impress their peers with their 17th geeky tweet of the day or a banal profile update on FaceSpace.
I read Carr’s article in The Atlantic this month, “Is Google making us Stoopid?” and was fascinated by the process in which media affects our ability to focus and read material and concentrate deeply.
Hi Diana,
I’m now wondering whether tools like Twitter that turn us into producers of content are actually changing how we consume media at the same time. So as I write (blog, tweet, microblog …) in short bursts, I start to read in the same way …
Thanks for the comment.